Re: We need easier installation.
On Mon, Oct 26, 1998 at 09:39:03AM +0000, Martin Alonso Soto wrote:
> Marc Singer <elf@netcom.com> wrote:
> > 2) Smooth install. All the questions must be asked up front or at
> > the end.
>
> Some days ago, David Engel proposed an idea that IMO is worth
> considering. It consists in making interactivity in package scripts
> conditional by using an environment variable. If the variable is not
> defined, the scripts will take their current behavior, i. e. asking
> all of the questions during the installation face. If the variable is
> defined, the scripts will only try to leave the package in a stable
> state (not necessarily operational, though) without asking any
> questions. New versions of dpkg/apt could start offering an option
> for defining this variable (or you could define it by hand) without
> breaking backwards compatibility.
Sounds pretty good. I guess we should recommend that any packages with
interactive configuration scripts (which are a good thing, just timed wrong
at the moment) split them out into a separate file... or move them to a new
postinst option, say "postconfig".
Hmm, now that I think of it, the environment variable will be rather
inconvenient: it makes it easy to non-interactively configure packages
during installation, but hard to interactively configure them later :)
Maybe we should just have a "reconfigure" option to postinst, and have a
separate program to call that after installing. eg:
reconfigure smail
or
dpkg-reconfig smail
And that will just run /var/lib/dpkg/info/smail.postinst reconfigure.
The transition period would be a bit strange ('configure' postinsts would
still be interactive, some of the time) but that's true of the environment
variable too...
This would be pretty easy to implement, though. I don't think we'd need any
special support from dpkg. Hmm...
Have fun,
Avery
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